Reply to TJ lost to Lake Braddock high school in Science Olympiad state competition

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][b]TL; DR: Lake Braddock is a good team, TJ probably hit some bad luck somewhere, and 2022 is weird, man.[/b]

I'm familiar with Science Olympiad and TJ's team - here's my understanding:

Both TJ and Lake Braddock are well-coached teams. Both teams' coaches were awarded on Wednesday for ten years coaching, and as the LB coach moves to state director, the TJ coach will likely stay where she is, making her one of the state's most experienced coaches. Admittedly, at the high school level a lot of team operation is delegated to student leadership instead of adult coaches, but the stability and experience these coaches provide is still invaluable.

There's no way TJ sent their team B to the state tournament of all places. In fact, TJ prides themselves on not even having a team B; according to their team website (https://www.tjscioly.org), for the first half of the season, they field three teams of equal skill level, and then shrink to one A team for this tournament. The website's FAQ page also tries to debunk the claim that freshmen never get sent to states - if they have to take the time to address that, I'm guessing they're taking very few freshmen (probably not more than a couple) in a given year. This being TJ, it would not shock me if the freshmen they did select have competed at nationals in the past with Longfellow or Cooper.

Historically, TJ has won every TJ-LB matchup, which is what makes this so surprising. Even this year, TJ and Lake Braddock competed against each other twice (the last time being a month before states), and it wasn't close either time - TJ blew LB out of the water, placing all three of their teams dozens of places ahead of LB. If you're going by that data alone, states should have been a TJ sweep like the last couple times. So what happened?

Looking at the tournament results, it seems like TJ had a bad day with builds. Four of the five events TJ did not medal in had a build component. From my own experience helping out in Science Olympiad, bad luck is easy to come by with builds - all you need is something to break the night before or weird testing conditions and you're done for. Lake Braddock, on the other hand, fared much better, so I'm guessing that they had better builds and avoided some of the issues that bit TJ. The fifth non-medal event was Dynamic Planet, which has been a strength of TJ this season, so that's weird. Either they didn't put their best people on the event (unlikely) or something about the test threw them off. In either scenario, it seems like a fluke.

There are a bunch of study events that also strike me as unusual (Chem Lab should have been an easy win for TJ and at least a medal for LB, Codebusters has pretty much always been TJ or LB, etc.) suggesting that they might have had strange tests in those events or some other oddities. If that's the case, it's no wonder TJ struggled - as to be expected from a bunch of book-smart teenagers, the tests have traditionally been their strength, so suspect tests are going to send their score crashing. (Tests that are too easy or too hard, for instance, become a challenge of what you just happen to randomly remember or not, instead of an actual knowledge test.) Keep in mind, this is the first fully in-person tournament in VA in two years, so there's a high chance for things to have gone wrong. People (both the competitors and the tournament organizers) are still rusty.

None of this is to put down Lake Braddock, of course. They've had a notable rise over the last few years. Three years ago, no one took them seriously - VA was viewed as the stomping grounds of TJ, Fairfax, and Langley. It took LB upsetting Fairfax in 2020 for people to really notice them (and presumably leave TJ/Langley quaking in their boots a little), and they've continued to get stronger over the pandemic. They certainly had a strong showing, very likely had some of the best devices at the tournament (yes, even better than TJ's in some cases), and there's no reason to believe this wasn't a well-deserved victory for them.

The last thing I want to point out is that Langley was only two points behind TJ. Three teams in a four-point range at the top of a state tournament is highly unusual, especially when one team has been dominating for a few years now. I think this just illustrates how weird this whole year has been for all of us, both iwthin and outside of Science Olympiad.[/quote]

Great summary, and it's awesome to have someone on these boards who clearly has a deep history with Science Olympiad.

Without addressing what others have said, my assertion wasn't that TJ would have sent its "B" team to this event - rather it's that Science Olympiad is not a thing that is done by the students at TJ who would make the best showing at a thing like Science Olympiad. It doesn't carry the same level of prestige that other competitions do, and TJ students (at least those selected by the old pre-pandemic process) are interested in prestige above most other things.[/quote]

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